High-quality medical systematic reviews require comprehensive literature searches to ensure the recommendations and outcomes are sufficiently reliable. Indeed, searching for relevant medical literature is a key phase in constructing systematic reviews and often involves domain (medical researchers) and search (information specialists) experts in developing the search queries. Queries in this context are highly complex, based on Boolean logic, include free-text terms and index terms from standardised terminologies (e.g., MeSH), and are difficult and time-consuming to build. The use of MeSH terms, in particular, has been shown to improve the quality of the search results. However, identifying the correct MeSH terms to include in a query is difficult: information experts are often unfamiliar with the MeSH database and unsure about the appropriateness of MeSH terms for a query. Naturally, the full value of the MeSH terminology is often not fully exploited. This paper investigates methods to suggest MeSH terms based on an initial Boolean query that includes only free-text terms. These methods promise to automatically identify highly effective MeSH terms for inclusion in a systematic review query. Our study contributes an empirical evaluation of several MeSH term suggestion methods. We perform an extensive analysis of the retrieval, ranking, and refinement of MeSH term suggestions for each method and how these suggestions impact the effectiveness of Boolean queries.
翻译:高质量的医疗系统审查需要全面的文献搜索,以确保建议和结果足够可靠。事实上,寻找相关的医疗文献是建立系统审查的关键阶段,往往涉及领域(医学研究人员)和搜索(信息专家)专家,以开发搜索查询。在这方面,根据布林逻辑,查询非常复杂,包括来自标准化术语(例如,MesH)的免费文本术语和索引术语,并且很难和费时地建立。使用MesH术语尤其表明可以提高搜索结果的质量。然而,确定正确的MesH术语以纳入查询是困难的:信息专家往往不熟悉MesH数据库,不能确定MesH术语是否适合查询。自然,MesH术语的全部价值往往没有得到充分利用。本文探讨了根据初步布林查询(只包括自由文本)提出MesH术语的方法。这些方法保证自动确定高效力的MesH术语,以便纳入系统审查查询。我们的研究为改进方法的每项方法的改进建议,我们为改进方法的每项方法的改进提供了评估。